


things learnt upon reunion

by dirtybinary



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Civil War (Marvel), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-26
Updated: 2015-11-26
Packaged: 2018-05-03 12:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5289908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It is their first day on the run, and their first night spent together in seventy years: part mission, part honeymoon.</i>
</p><p>Bit by bit, Steve gets the hang of Bucky again.</p><p>Or: the CA:CW trailer gave me feelings and then this happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	things learnt upon reunion

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [things learnt upon reunion](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5657335) by [May4090](https://archiveofourown.org/users/May4090/pseuds/May4090)



i.

Bucky sleeps the way he fights: like a wild cat, curled in on himself in the red henley, the most comfortable of the three shirts he owns. His metal hand gleams near the knives on his belt, humming quietly even at rest; the other lies in the circumscribed space between chin and chest, flesh fingers empty and half unfurled in sleep. Childlike, flowerlike.

It is their first day on the run, and their first night spent together in seventy years: part mission, part honeymoon. They took turns driving all day in near-complete silence--Steve turned on the radio once or twice to listen to the news, only to have Bucky snap it off almost at once--and endured a fleeting moment of awkwardness when they bedded down on top of their spare clothes in the back of the stolen van. It’s cold, so cold their breath would fog pearlescent if they stepped outside, but how close is too close to huddle?

(“I’ll watch,” Steve had said, at the same time as Bucky said, “You sleep.” Then Steve said, “You sleep,” speaking over Bucky’s, “I’ll watch,” and they stared at each other for a few seconds of irritated disbelief before Bucky bit on his lower lip and Steve burst out laughing.

“Coin toss,” Bucky suggested, just as Steve took a quarter from his pocket and said, “Heads.”

Steve won. It was a rigged coin he’d bought from Ebay for this very purpose.)

He hunches over his sketchpad now, sipping from a frosty can of Red Bull--he has no intention of waking Bucky at 0330 hours for his shift as previously agreed, and every intention of driving on as soon as the sun is up. The window is bejewelled with frost, and the overhead streetlamp peeks in to cast a tangerine incandescence over Bucky’s sleeping form like a blanket, a good-night kiss, a laying on of hands. Steve is neither religious nor romantic but he likes to believe that the cosmos has its own peculiar sentience, and--what with the way Bucky looks now--anything sentient, any old frozen heart with a shred of good in it, would want to weave itself like a living quilt over his friend-stranger-lover and protect his fragile sleep. His fingers cannot touch Bucky, so his pencil does the work for him, tracing the hard angle of the jawline in counterpoint to the gentle contour of lip and cheek. Bucky is all mean muscle and brittle bone now, but not even Hydra could strip his face of its roundness, or the cleft from his chin, or the last vestiges of antebellum youth from his eyes.

Steve remembers the old Bucky starfished across their narrow cot, covers kicked away to soak in the tender Brooklyn summer, mouth half open, limbs apt to windmill in the night. He wonders if this incarnation of Bucky remembers too, and decides that one way or another, it doesn’t matter.

****  
  
  


ii.

This new Bucky is afraid of being alone. Terrified, even.

In a fight, he glowers; in a conversation, he pouts; but when left to his own devices, his face naturally settles into a look of large-eyed perplexity. Steve recalls these facial nerves and cheek muscles making this same expression on the rare nights Bucky had been stood up by a girl he really liked, or in the war, when he and Steve had to split up on a mission. He doesn’t yet understand this familiar stranger driving next to him and does not presume to. For all that they share a physical form and a cognitive infrastructure--even some rare, precious memories--the new Bucky and the old are rather different entities, and there are already so many barriers between them that the last thing Steve wants to do is build another out of his assumptions.

So he says nothing.

They risk a motel one night, just for the showers, and Bucky emerges from the bathroom dripping wet and wearing a towel as a loincloth. In that moment, Steve learns--or re-learns--several crucial things about himself, none of which he feels like voicing at present. He puts on his I’m-keeping-it-together smile and shrugs his nothing-really-gets-to-me shrug and, gesturing at the twin beds, asks, “Which one d’you want?”

Bucky’s face does the droopy thing again, but he says, “Whatever,” and dumps his backpack on the bed closer to the door.

There is no need to stand guard tonight. All the same, Steve lies awake, staring up at the grimy plaster of the ceiling until its stains and pockmarks are all but imprinted on the backs of his eyelids. The aisle between the two beds--three feet of scratchy linoleum and a rickety dresser--is an impassable chasm, like the one he’d jumped across in a burning building in Azzano back in the day, like the alpine air gusting between two outstretched hands (so near, so far, a leap and a catch he has not so much relived as rehearsed over and over in his dreams for the past few years, as if in anticipation of a second chance). Bucky is lying down in what is practically parade rest position, no cat-curling today, and Steve knows he is awake too. He thinks, _What’s the worst that could happen?_

He pushes himself up on one elbow and peers over at the next bed. “Buck?”

Bucky rolls over. The insides of his eyebrows have gone up, the outsides of his lips turned down. “Yeah?”

The syllable is stone-sharpened with incongruous defiance. Against the tacky bedspread, the flesh hand’s bird-boned fingers have begun to flutter. Steve takes in the near-imperceptible tremor at the periphery of his vision and pointedly does not look at it, does not call attention to the weakness it suggests. (It is the same reason Bucky never helped him up after one of his ill-starred back alley brawls before the war; tender pride calls for ungentle love, which even then Bucky had in abundance.) He does not say anything. Steve can be eloquent at the best of times but already the chasm is widening, and it cannot be bridged with words.

He gets up. Crosses the floor on freezing bare feet, and sits on the edge of the bed. (All these years since Abraham Erskine, and it still surprises him how far the mattress dips.) Bucky’s arms and back stiffen; Steve can feel his centre of gravity shift, less out of fear than from habit. Their eyes hold. Bucky's are big and long-fringed. His hands make no movement towards the six or seven knives and pistols he’s probably hidden under the blankets, and it is the sweetest show of trust Steve has seen from him this side of the century.

In the twilit room, Bucky’s face is an unfathomable mystery of planes and angles. Hearing is no more revelatory than vision; the only sound between them is the slow synchrony of their breathing and the ever-present hum of warm, well-honed machinery. Then a bedspring creaks, and with all the deliberation of a sniper's bullet, Bucky gathers his limbs and rolls onto his back. The resulting square foot or so of unoccupied mattress beckons to Steve, a silent invitation.

Mind over matter: Steve can still fold his body into a tiny origami crane of righteous rage if he tries hard enough. Somehow or other he fits himself on the bed in a more or less horizontal position, and immediately becomes aware that he cannot breathe, not because his lungs have taken up method acting but because there is a 220-pound man plastered against his chest like a fridge magnet. Bucky clings, not like an infant or a lover but like a man dangling over five thousand feet of thin air, and now it is not only his fingers that tremble but all the rest of him.

“S’okay,” says Steve as best as he can, with his face smothered in a cloud of chestnut hair and his throat swelling with emotions for which no name was ever invented. “I couldn’t sleep either.”

****  
  
  


iii.

After a wash, Bucky’s hair dries into an amorphous mop that is frizzy at the top and curly at the bottom. Steve learns this when they finally check themselves into a hotel room with a bathtub, and he fills it with hot water and apricot bath foam and grins sidelong at Bucky. “You first or me?”

Bucky’s face acquires a distinctly harassed expression. This is the put-out, set-upon look he wears when something difficult and unpleasant must be done, like speaking to a hotel receptionist or braving a supermarket to replenish their stash of on-the-go snacks. It always makes an appearance just before he goes into the shower, either because of some lingering claustrophobia or because he hates letting Steve out of sight even for a one-minute perfunctory rinse. Ever since the breathless night they shared a bed, he has hardly been out of arm’s reach, hovering at Steve’s left flank every time they leave the van and sidling up close to him whenever they sit down together. On his part, Steve doesn’t mind at all.

“Okay, fine,” says Steve after a terse, petulant pause. “If you promise not to wriggle, I think we can both fit without breaking anything.”

Bucky grins. For all the things that have changed about him, this is pure 1930s Brooklynite jackass: a lifted brow, a sardonic twitch of the lip, a glint of the eye that makes Steve feel more alive in its split-second duration than the last four or five years put together. “‘Kay,” he says. “After you.”

They strip off. Bucky does not bother to pretend he isn’t staring, so Steve makes no secret of his own careful appraisal, taking in the asymmetry of his stance, the over-prominent ribs, the red ridge of scar tissue that borders flesh and metal. The water closes around them both, Bucky’s back flush against his chest; and Steve’s mind may be tired and distracted, but his body responds immediately. Bucky doesn’t seem to care. He leans into Steve like they were fired together in a kiln for this purpose, his head on Steve’s shoulder, his flesh hand on Steve’s knee. “All right?” Steve asks.

Bucky _hmmph_ s in assent. “Never gonna move again.”

His metal arm rests on the side of the tub, its surface misting over in the humid air. Steve is half asleep, and to his semi-conscious mind it makes perfect sense to trail his own dripping hand over its glittering dips and swells, tracing with a fingertip the five points of the red star, the grooves that run between the plates. “Hey, Buck, look,” he says. “I can write on it, like a mirror.”

Bucky _hmmph_ s again, making a tepid effort to swat him away. Steve dodges. “You can’t see, but I just gave your star a smiley face.” He doodles some more. “And a handlebar moustache.”

There is a weird burbling noise, and a movement that produces a small tidal wave. Water sloshes over their tangled feet and out of the tub. “Buck?” asks Steve, concerned. Then his mind clears, and he finds the epicentre of the earthquake. Bucky is laughing. Bucky--not a newspaper photo, not a black and white video clip; _his_ Bucky, warm, solid, and definitely embodied--is in his arms, and he is laughing.

“That tickles," says Bucky. "Asshole."

His voice is still creaky, but then again Bucky has always had a creaky voice: the sort that, in the right context, could be labelled a purr. Years and years of being the healthiest man in the world, and Steve is still familiar with the sensation of his heart missing a beat. “I didn’t know you could feel that.”

“Of course I can, dumbfuck,” says Bucky, like it’s a law of nature or something. He relaxes, tipping his head into the curve of Steve’s neck and shoulder, and after a few flustered heartbeats Steve starts tracing idle patterns on the arm again. “Feels nice. Wish we could do this forever.”

There are a great many responses Steve could make, but he only says, “Yeah.”

A brief pause, during which Bucky sifts his right hand through the bubbles on the surface of the water. Some of them have taken flight and alighted on the tip of his earlobe. “We could disappear,” he says, softly, quietly, and it is a moment before Steve realises he is continuing an unspoken conversation and not the spoken one. “Drive ‘till we reach the coast, build a raft and row ourselves headlong into the Pacific.”

Steve stares at his own free hand, which in the past few seconds has developed a separate intelligence and moved itself onto the centre of Bucky’s chest. “Uh-huh.”

“And then just keep going,” says Bucky, as if he hasn’t noticed. Of course he has. Bucky notices everything. “Sail south into the tropics, where it’s nice and warm. Maybe swim with a porpoise or two.”

“What’d we do for food?” Steve asks.

“Fish,” says Bucky. “I can catch fish with my bare hands. Kept myself alive like that for a whole week once, eating nothing but raw fish. Like a grizzly bear.”

“Buck,” says Steve. There is an odd sensation in his chest, as if his heart has joined the revolt and is attempting to batter its way through his sternum. He looks down and realises he has scrawled _JBB_ half a dozen times on his metal canvas, an indecipherable tangle of loops and coils unwinding down the bicep and along the wrist. “I just--”

“Yeah, I know. I’m being dumb, etcetera.”

“I was gonna say,” says Steve, his palm spread flat against Bucky’s bony side, “that sounds perfect to me.”

****  
  
  


iv.

“Seriously,” Bucky says, as the water drains away. “What are you gonna tell them?”

It is a question of purely academic interest. Natasha has stopped calling, and even Sam’s e-mails have gone unread. One day Steve will find a way to let them know he’s alive, but not now. Not when the dreams still keep him awake more nights than not, dreams of Tony clanking around in his broken suit and Nat trying to fire a pistol with its barrel splintered into pieces and Sam silhouetted tiny and alone against a vast slate sky, twisting and looping through a constellation of missiles.

His friends--and what a versatile word that is. His friends, plural, are far away. His friend, singular, is sitting on the covered toilet seat, curled up snug and slouchy in Steve’s favourite black sweater. Bucky does not, by any stretch of fabric or imagination, fit into Steve’s shirts--the waists are too narrow and the shoulders never fill out quite right--but that’s never stopped him from trying. He reaches for Steve’s clothing with the same unthinking automaticity with which he grabs Steve’s shield in a fight, and as with so many other things, Steve is too pleased to complain.

“Nothing they don’t already know,” he says. He shrugs into the largest of Bucky’s henleys and studies himself in the misty mirror. The shirt is almost obscenely undersized on him, and the sight of it fills him with something hot and dangerous, a feral, protective rage. It is his turn, now, to be both guardian and advocate. “That I choose you. And they can dangle the whole world like a pendulum in front of me, but they’d still have to claw you out of my grubby hands inch by bloody inch.”

Bucky smiles, the creased skin around his eyes crinkling in mirth or grief or nonplussed joy, and Steve--vigilante, terrorist, fugitive, runaway, whatever they’ve chosen to name him today--can’t remember ever having been so happy in his life.

**Author's Note:**

> It goes without saying that none of this is serious speculation for the movie, just wishful thinking and a much-needed outlet for Feels.
> 
> I'm [dirtybinary](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) on tumblr--come say hi!


End file.
